Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Louise Bourgeois' at the Riverside and 'Decoy' at the Serpentine Gallery
Robert Mapplethorpe took a famous photograph of her when she was 71, grinning like a naughty schoolgirl and carrying one of her sculptures under her arm. The sculpture explained the grin - Fillette, a latex and plaster simulacrum of a penis the size of a marrow, complete with testicles. Not the studio portrait you might expect of a lady who has become the unquestioned grande dame of American sculpture, but appropriate in its way. Born in Paris, Louise Bourgeois was an intime of the Surrealists in the 1930s (she emigrated to America in 1939), which may partially explain her perennially subversive attitude.
She is 78 now and - on the evidence of ''Louise Bourgeois'' at the Riverside Studios - still going strong. What's most striking about this show, made up entirely of recent work, is that its contents do not remotely suggest an art of old age. There is no reliance on formula here, no going through the motions, no gentle subsidence. Walk in and you're eyeball to eyeball with Nature Study (Velvet Eyes), a persuasively (and characteristically) weird piece that houses a pair of smooth marble eyes, cartoon-like peepers, in a rugged stone coffer. This trapped, disembodied stare manages an elision of the comic and the sinister, a favoured Bourgeois tactic. Eyes peeled, it primes you, too, for what's to follow.
''I am interested in body parts,'' Bourgeois told an interviewer a couple of years ago. And how; the interest borders on obsession. There are no foot-long phalluses on view at the Riverside, but besides eyes there are severed legs, one disembodied hand and a pair of large wooden globes that encourage anatomical interpretation in no uncertain terms. The latter belong to No Exit, in...
